September 9th, 2008
Saints and non-smokers also get lung cancer
What religious faith I have is fueled by a saintly woman named Nellie Harris.
Mrs. Harris was a leader of our block club when I moved to Winter Avenue in the early 1980s. She was among the most Christ-like people I ever met.
She even did the miracle of the loaves and fishes — several times. Once for a block party, twice at Christmas.
We did a food drive for the county. I spent $100 at a warehouse store and was quite proud. Mrs. Harris, who had little money, absolutely filled the back of my van with food. It took 20 minutes to unload.
Mrs. Harris never smoked, but in 1990 learned that what she thought was persistent pneumonia was lung cancer. She didn’t complain as the disease took her. She talked only of how blessed she was, by family, by faith, by neighbors like me.
Her death was a mystery, but a clue came as I walked out onto her porch to console her husband.
He had a cigarette in his hand.
A recent study of non-smokers’ lung cancer at PLoS Medicine shows her case was not unusual. Each year 20,000 people in the U.S. die of lung cancer who never smoked themselves.
Mrs. Harris’ cigarette was one clue. Another lay in the shingles on her house — they were made of asbestos. She was a great cook, and one hypothesis among female victims in the Pacific Rim is that the fumes from stir-frying may be carcinogens.
Or maybe God just called her home. That was her theory. Some folks are just genetically susceptible to lung cancer, the study found.
Mrs. Harris passed away nearly two decades ago and I still miss her terribly. You probably have someone like her in your life.
If you have never smoked your chance of dieing from lung cancer is still about 1 in 100. Smokers increase their risk to anywhere from 12-20 percent.
The American Lung Association says about one in five college students smokes, and the rest have to inhale that smoke as they walk across campus.
New York now prohibits indoor smoking at colleges, but a half-dozen campuses still sell tobacco on-campus, including the Culinary Institute of America (CIA).
How many of those non-smokers who die anyway breathed second-hand smoke, like Mrs. Harris, I can’t say.
But I can say, from watching her die, that it’s a horrible way to go. Especially for a saint.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 09/09/08
